


Uncanny

by thedevilchicken



Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Backstory, Cunnilingus, F/M, Getting Together, Identity Issues, Seduction, Sparring, Woman on Top
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2020-08-04
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:49:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25699102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: Deimos and Stentor have met before.
Relationships: Deimos/Stentor (Assassin's Creed)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 14
Collections: Rare Pairs Exchange 2020





	Uncanny

**Author's Note:**

  * For [StopTalkingAtMe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopTalkingAtMe/gifts).



> Set in an AU where Myrrine and Nikolaos have two daughters, Kassandra and Alexia, who bear an uncanny resemblance.

"You knew who I was," he says. 

She looks at him. The expression on her face in the flickering light from the lamp in his hand is what she hopes says, _is that not obvious?_ and from the agitated way he shifts his weight and looks away, all shadows and annoyance, she'd say that's precisely the message he's got. When he looks back up and glares at her, she knows she's right. 

This is the thing they've been dancing around so poorly for the best part of four months now, since peace broke out between the leagues and his return to Sparta. She was already there when he came, sitting with _mater_ and Kassandra at the table; he came through the door, _pater_ first and then him, and she still remembers how he looked at her. It was like he had a word on his tongue more like a curse than her name that he bit back with a grimace, then he turned to Kassandra and said her name instead. 

"Stentor," Kassandra replied. "You know Myrrine and Alexia?"

He didn't reply - he just took off his armour and went to wash before they ate and she scowled down at the table as he went. But she knew he'd known her face, if not her name. They'd met before.

She knew who he was, when they met. There's no getting away from that. 

That's why she did what she did.

\---

The Cult of Kosmos has an excellent network of spies and Deimos knew that. So, when she heard the name of the general in command of all the Spartan troops in Boeotia, and knew that information came from their most trusted spy, she believed what she heard: it was Stentor, son of Nikolaos, the adopted child he hadn't thrown off a fucking mountain. And, as much as she'd have liked to put her sword into his gut for what the Wolf of Sparta had done to her, the Cult had other ideas. They wanted him to join them. Grudgingly, she supposed she understood.

The Ghost of Kosmos told her they should send someone else to Boeotia, probably because she thought Deimos would kill him. As she reclined there on the couch while Deimos paced, The Ghost said turning him to their cause would take subtlety - the implication being that Deimos was not subtle. She didn't argue that point; she's always known she's not that kind of weapon. She's got more in common with the sword in her hand than with the sort of woman the Ghost wanted to send, all smiles and grace and pretty dresses. 

She acquiesced to the plan, though she refused to let them go alone. She rode from Athens to Thebes to meet a Cultist politician, along with two of the Ghost's prettiest girls. And she'd have ridden straight into the Spartan camp and dragged Stentor out into the dirt by the braid in his hair, crushed him underneath her heel and subtlety be damned, but she bit her tongue and played her part; she threatened the Theban leader and had him send an envoy to the Spartans. Though it wasn't in the Spartan constitution to back down from a fight, it was unlikely Stentor would refuse the opportunity to assess his enemy before entering the battlefield. Perhaps the Athenians liked to believe they were superior in intellect, but Deimos knew the truth was Spartans simply valued weapons more than words.

He came the following day, with a detachment of Spartan soldiers who stayed outside the city gates and a smaller number who came with him as far as the door of the leader's house. They'd organised a party, fine food and fine drink and music in the air that Deimos supposed must have taken some skill on the musicians' part, and the Ghost's pretty girls wore their prettiest dresses, fastened at each shoulder with a pretty gold brooch. Deimos wore the same tunic that she always wore, just without her armour buckled over it. It seemed fitting, since the Spartans left their armour at the door, even if it left her feeling underdressed. 

The plan should have worked, but it didn't work. The girls smiled and they flirted, flitting about in their gauzy dresses, but Stentor spent more time speaking with one of the Athenian commanders than he did with either of the two of them. Deimos smiled to herself over her cup of wine as she watched them try, though she supposed she shouldn't have been quite so amused by their repeated failures. She recognised one of them, after all - the brunette's name was Helen, one of Chrysis' girls from the Temple of Hera who'd finished her training a year or two before Deimos had. She'd named herself for Helen of Troy, like so many of Chrysis' girls had liked to. She didn't ask what the other girl's name was, the one with the light hair and the jewel-green eyes, but she wouldn't have been surprised to find out it was Helen, too. 

And then, Stentor's gaze found her, across the courtyard through the haze of all the hanging lamps. He frowned, and she frowned, and he looked away, but every now and then he glanced her way again, as she sat there in the corner, drinking wine. And, in the end, toward the end of the night, he finally brushed off the Helens and came toward her. As he approached, his expression changed. His eyes were wary but his cheeks were flushed.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" she asked. 

"Because you look like someone else," he replied. 

"I look like me." 

He scowled. He looked away, shifted his weight, took a sip of his drink, then glanced back down at her. 

"Do you have a name?" he asked. 

"Does it matter?" she replied. 

He grimaced at her, his frustration perfectly obvious, and then he stalked away. But he didn't stop looking and she supposed she understood exactly why; after all, she'd met Kassandra, and chances were that he had, too. The eagle-bearing misthios seemed to pop up everywhere she shouldn't. 

She could almost hear the Ghost inside her head, telling her to turn that connection to her own advantage, though the thought of doing it wasn't exactly to her taste. Still, she told herself that any revenge on Nikolaos was sufficient and when he passed her next, on his way to have his cup refilled, she drained her own as an excuse to follow him. 

"You're out of place," she told him, as a servant from the kitchens poured their wine. 

He frowned at her. "I'm a Spartan outside Sparta," he replied. "Of course I'm out of place." 

She gave him a hard look, a displeased look, then turned to leave the way she'd come. He caught her arm and under any normal circumstances she might have gone ahead and broken it for less, but she took a breath and let him do it. All she did was raise her brows.

"You don't look like an hetaera," he said. He gestured at her tunic, shorter and dramatically less translucent than the Helens' were, and at her various scars. 

She snorted. "No?"

"You don't act like an hetaera, either." 

She smiled mock-sweetly. She patted his cheek. "That's because I'm not," she said. 

He narrowed his eyes. "Are you a mercenary?" he asked, and she knew precisely why he'd asked that, and who it was she reminded him of.

"No," she replied. 

"Then what are you doing here?"

"I was invited," she said, then lifted her cup. "And I like the wine." Then she turned and walked away again. 

He watched her all night, or at least for what was left of it, until the guests were yawning, and the leader offered them a place to stay - there was a room for Stentor and his men would have bedrolls in the courtyard for the duration of their stay. Deimos watched him consider it, the pros and cons of staying there to talk more with the Athenians in the morning instead of returning to their camp outside the city and awaiting the following afternoon's planned talks. He looked at her. He frowned. When he answered their host, he was brusque but said yes.

Both of the Ghost's two pretty girls went to Stentor's room in turn once the lights were out; both of the Ghost's pretty girls were turned away again, as Deimos watched from her own room. Then, because she could, because she suspected that she knew what he might want, because she was interested to see what he would do after rejecting two such beautiful and insistent spies, she picked herself up and she went there, too. 

"How many times do I have to say I'm not interested?" Stentor said, irritably, when she opened the door. 

He had his back to her. He'd evidently just untied the loincloth from around his waist and was folding up the fabric as he stood naked in the lamplight. Deimos leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed over her chest as she looked at him; his back was broad enough, his thighs thick enough, waist slim enough, skin littered with sufficient scars to be interesting enough. She didn't dislike the look of him. That was something. 

"Really?" she replied, in a mockingly disappointed tone. "That's such a pity, general." And Stentor turned around so quickly that he almost tripped on his own feet. He still had his partially-folded loincloth in his hands, covering his cock, which she thought did seem a pity. 

"Why are you here?" he asked. 

"The same reason as the others, I imagine," she replied. "But if you're not interested..."

She pushed herself away from the frame of the door where she was leaning and when she made a show of turning away, he told her, "Stop." 

She turned back. She smiled sharply. " _Stop_?" she said. 

He grimaced, like even the thought of what he was about to say was painful, or distasteful, or a rough mix of the two. "I'm interested," he said, and he tossed the loincloth onto the table by the window; he narrowly missed the burning lamp and the whoosh of air made the flame flicker wildly. It steadied quickly, though, and once she'd closed the door, she stepped back against it and looked at him. She liked the definition of muscle in his chest and the sharp lines at his hips. She liked the thickness of his cock and the flush in his cheeks and how his eyes narrowed as he reached down and wrapped one hand around himself. 

"On the bed," she said. " _Kneel_ ," she said. And his narrowed eyes narrowed even further, but he did as he was told; he knelt down on his borrowed bed, sat back on his heels and spread his thighs and watched her closely as she dragged a chair across the room. She set it at the foot of the bed and sat down on it, still dressed, in her tunic and her sandals. She sat back, forearms to the chair arms, and cocked her head at him. 

"Do it," she said, and jerked her chin as she looked down at his stiffening cock. "The evening lacked entertainment. I plan to watch."

She almost thought he might balk at the idea, such a proper Spartan general, but he didn't even hesitate; he wrapped one hand around himself again and started stroking. He wasn't slow about it, either - he didn't tease himself, or try teasing her. He just licked his palm with the flat of his tongue then rubbed his fingers over the thick, flushed head where a bead of moisture had apparently already gathered, then he pushed the shaft straight through his fist and jerked himself. 

He bared his teeth with his eyes on her and he reached down to squeeze his balls, tightly, roughly, made his hips buck hard into his hand. He was Spartan; maybe he wasn't used to teasing, or wasn't used to strange women in his room. Either way, she appreciated his willingness. She appreciated the look of it, too, how his muscles tensed and shifted, the harsh sound of his breath, the sound of palm on cock. She'd have liked to have stripped herself down and slipped her fingers down between her thighs but that was hardly the point, even if she was completely aware of how wet the sight was making her. 

She watched until he came, spilling over his hand and onto the blanket with a groan he tried - and failed - to stifle with his gritted teeth. He hissed in a breath as he looked at her, like he'd have rather put his spear into her throat than masturbate in front of her, but somehow couldn't help himself. Then she stood up from the chair. She leaned down, smiled, patted his cheek, then left him there like that. She could almost hear him seething as she did, which might have added to her glee as she slipped underneath the blanket in her room. She spread her thighs and ran her fingers in between them. She could have almost laughed.

\---

In the morning, she saw him at breakfast, while the soldiers organised themselves a competition. Archery, they said; they'd set up targets in the gardens and may the best man win. And, while they practiced, the Helens seized their opportunity; Deimos rolled her eyes as they begged Stentor to teach them how to shoot. 

Of course, Deimos knew her old acquaintance from the Temple knew how to use a bow, and more than likely both women did. The Cult wasn't in the habit of keeping agents who were unprepared to strike in a variety of ways, and Deimos recalled long hours spent shooting targets in the woods until her fingertips were raw. She remembered hours spent with swords and spears and learning about poisons, and sitting cross-legged on the Temple floor with a needle in her hand as she learned to sew up others' wounds. Chrysis had a dagger that she used to test them; Deimos remembers the sting of it against her skin, and then the sting of the needle as another girl took her turn to sew. She still had the scar. She wondered if the Helens did. 

Stentor, of course, wanted no part in teaching them. He seemed uninterested in the extreme, and recruited two of his men to take his place though the Helens pouted at him in protest. He glanced at Deimos instead, who was leaning against the nearby garden wall, arms crossed over her chest. 

"Do you shoot?" he asked. 

She raised both her eyebrows and glanced up the garden at the target. 

"Do you?" she replied. 

He blew out an irritated breath. Then he lifted his bow, drew it, and fired - to his credit, she had to admit he did strike quite close to the centre. Then he held it out to her. 

She knew exactly what the Ghost would say: this was not why Deimos had come to Thebes, and she should be pushing Stentor toward either - or both - of the Helens. Once caught, they'd reel him in, and initiation to the Cult would follow quickly. The Ghost would have told her no, but she did it anyway, because she'd never been good at following instructions. Back at the Temple, she'd known she'd acted out of turn so often that if she didn't pass the final test then Chrysis would cut her throat without a moment's hesitation. 

Few girls passed that test, but it didn't usually matter - few girls were expected to. Fifteen years old, she'd been led into the hall where the Cult kept their most precious artefacts and, one by one, she'd touched them, put her hands on them, wrapped her fingers tight around them. She remembers the power she felt there, underneath the surface, waiting. She'd lifted the sword and as she'd felt the blood inside her sing, she'd known Chrysis couldn't kill her after all. She'd be the Cult's new weapon. Chrysis, for her part, smiled and told her she was proud, as if she'd never had a doubt.

Deimos took the bow. She could have put an arrow straight through Stentor's heart but she put it through the target's instead, without a word or a moment's hesitation. She returned the bow. And, as the soldiers stared, she left them there. She could almost feel his eyes on her.

The afternoon was dull, full of tedious talks of absolutely no importance as neither side had any say in the course of the war they were fighting. They knew it, but Deimos supposed they were taking the time to assess one another in this pseudo-friendly setting, arguing at the table instead of fighting on the battlefield. She could tell the generals' men were bristling for a fight, though, as she was herself - she'd have liked to have spent an hour loosing arrows at a target or letting her fist connect with someone's jaw. She'd never been good at sitting still. She supposed that was why she'd always been in trouble at the Temple. 

The talks droned on and Deimos dozed under a trellis in the garden. The talks ended and dinner was served, but she couldn't raise much appetite; she felt restless, and lacked any particular interest in much else but wine and the way that Stentor looked at her. Other men had wanted her, of course - she'd had other lovers, older men, mostly scared of her, but Stentor didn't seem scared. It was almost a shame that what he wanted was her fucking sister and not her. 

After dinner, once the festivities concluded, the guests all retired and the Helens tried again. It was heavy-handed stuff and Deimos was sure Chrysis had taught them better, but she supposed at least they were tenacious, even if Stentor showed precisely the opposite of any interest in them. Maybe they'd been told Spartan men could take some getting through to, or this was some kind of test for them - the Cult of Kosmos does so love its tests. But, one by one, they went to the door of Stentor's room and slipped inside; and, one by one, he turned them out again. Deimos chuckled. She leaned against the door of her own room and told them both, "Oh, that's bad luck." Then, she went inside his room herself. As it turned out, he was waiting. 

He was sitting naked on the bed when she stepped in and closed the door behind her. He had tanlines on his skin from his armour but she couldn't say she minded - she had those, too, where her tunic ended across her thighs, the leather strips of her armour at her shoulders, her feet at the line where her greaves ended. His were stark delineations between tanned skin and pale, and when she went close she leaned down and traced the curve on his chest between his collarbones where his breastplate must have usually sat. She tensed. She laughed. 

"On my knees again?" he asked, and she cocked her head and looked down at him, drumming her fingertips against her thigh as she considered that. 

"Yes," she said. "But not there." She dragged the chair across the room again, with a squeak of wood against the tiles. She stood in front of it and felt her cheeks turn warm as she considered her next move. Then she caught her tunic's hem with both her hands and pulled it up; she was bare underneath, and when she perched on the very edge of the chair she spread her legs and let him look. He looked. 

"Here," she said, and pointed to the tiles between her feet. So he moved. He wasn't elegant but she'd never had much time for elegance. She liked the blunt way he dropped to his knees between her legs. She liked the way he looked up at her face as his cock started to harden and how his face turned pink as his gaze dropped down between her thighs. 

"Use your mouth," she said, she said, as she tucked the extraneous length of her tunic in at the small of her back. Then, as he lifted his hands, she clucked her tongue and shook her head to stop him. " _Only_ your mouth," she said, and he made a face, but that didn't stop him in the slightest. 

He used his mouth. He used _only_ his mouth. The way her legs were spread so wide - so wide her hips began to ache as time went by - had parted her hips a little, and he used the tip of his tongue there, tracing the line where she was open. He didn't tease, almost like he didn't know what teasing was. He just licked her there, the tip of his tongue against her slit, before he leaned in even closer and pushed his tongue up to her clit. She could feel herself throbbing as he did it, at the heat of his tongue and his breath against her, and she clutched at the arms of the chair as he sealed his lips and sucked. He was stroking himself, too - she could hear it, oddly loud over the sound of her own breath. He was panting against her in no time at all, dipping his tongue in deeper, licking her, finding out how wet she was and not just from his mouth. 

She'd have liked to have pushed him down, she thought, pushed him back, finished herself off quickly while he watched and did the same himself - the pressure of his mouth wasn't teasing but it was maddening, almost not enough all by itself but somehow, minute by minute, as her hips shifted, as thighs started to tremble, as she clenched her jaw and bared her teeth, he got her there. She gasped and bucked her hips and when he sat back, his face was flushed and his lips were pink and he worked his cock with his eyes on her cunt and his hand around himself so tight it must have hurt. He came, with an almighty jerk of his hips that looked like it might have strained something, in streaks over the floor between her sandalled feet.

"Do you have a name?" he asked her, still kneeling there, his voice still raw and his eyes still dark. 

"Does it matter?" she replied. 

She shrugged tensely. He took a breath. "I'll call you Kassandra," he said. And when she said nothing in reply, he asked, "Don't you want to know whose name that is?" 

She stood, the movement so abrupt she almost pushed him back. 

"No," she said, hotly, as he frowned up at her. "I don't." 

When she left the room and glanced back from the door, he was still kneeling there. 

Her name is not _Kassandra_. She could have killed him on the spot for saying it, but she told herself that she still had important work to do.

Besides, she'd have preferred to kill Kassandra. Then who could Stentor have compared her to?

\---

In the morning, once they'd eaten, the soldiers took up wooden training swords and organised themselves another competition. Deimos rolled her eyes, though she felt her hand twitch to her side where her sword should have been. It was wrapped in a cloak underneath her borrowed pillow with a Cult guard stationed by the door, but she still missed it and a wooden sword would not do in its place. 

She sat by the pond in the garden, underneath the trellis where the shade was pleasant on her skin, and she watched them fight. She had to admit that she liked it, at least ten times more than she enjoyed the droning talks - the Spartans had a particular style to the way they fought, practiced and brutal, and the Athenian men were good but couldn't match it. She supposed she understood why that was, considering how Spartan men had no other occupation. She had no other occupation, either, and she never had, so she felt she understood. 

The Helens joined her in the shade to watch, in their see-through dresses with their shiny pins and towering hair. They smelled like perfumed oil and ate like birds and Deimos understood that, too - they were pretty things only on the outside, raised to be that way to serve the Cult, but deadly when required. She'd watched women like them seduce better men then Stentor, and more important men, and any of the others there would likely have been extremely glad to be seduced, but they'd had no luck with him at all. Of course, they also had a secondary objective: the Athenian general. She learned that as they murmured between themselves, aware that she could hear them but she supposed that might have been the point. She had Stentor on the hook; they would take the Athenian general and his polemarch. 

Deimos' hands itched as she watched the fight. She'd barely even touched her sword since they'd arrived and hadn't fought at all, and what good was it being the great weapon of the Cult when she'd spilled none of the blood that was on the ground? She stood before she realised she'd meant to, but she meant it when she walked into the garden and retrieved a wooden sword from the pile by the edge of the pond. She meant it when she looked straight at Stentor and then challenged the man standing just to his left. 

The soldier laughed but he agreed and when he said, "Apologies, General; this won't take long," she broke his nose with her wooden sword's wooden hilt. 

Stentor looked at the man, on his knees, bleeding from his nose into the dirt, and shook his head and laughed out loud. "No, it didn't take long," he said, then he stooped to take the man's sword himself. He raised his brows at her. When she smiled, she bared her teeth right to the canines. 

Stentor was prepared, and he was good. She was faster, and stronger, but he had skill and exceptional training, and when their wooden swords clashed she felt the strike reverberate right through her arm and jar her shoulder. It was bracing, she thought, like the smell of blood in the air and the heat of the sun on her skin and the scratch of dust under her feet and they circled each other, struck, withdrew; he swept her feet from under her and she pushed back up with a growl under her breath; she barged him with one shoulder and knocked him down into the dirt and he roared as he pulled himself back up. Her heart hammered hard in her chest. And when they pushed in close, sword to sword, hands grasping at each other's wrists, breath hot, teeth bared, by the gods she could have kissed him. She could have fucked him there in front of all of them and the press of his erection to her hip said he'd have let her. Instead, she frowned and she stepped back, and held up both her hands. 

"A draw?" she said, against each one of her instincts. She could have beaten him, she knew that, if she'd tried a little harder, if she hadn't had a job to do. 

He frowned at her. He nodded tightly. "A draw," he said, and she threw the sword back down into the pile. Then she walked away, dusting off her tunic as she went. 

Later, though, after hours of talks that she'd have much preferred to sleep through, after dinner that she wolfed down, ravenous and entirely insatiable, she went up to her room. She watched the Helens slipping down the corridor and in with the Athenians. And Deimos, she went into Stentor's. She had a feeling he'd be waiting. 

When she pushed him down on his back on the bed, he let her do it. When she pulled her tunic off over her head, he lay back and watched. When she used her own belt to tie his hands above his head, he didn't seem to think about complaining. And when she straddled his hips, naked except for the sandals she still wore, the look on his face said there was nothing else he wanted more - the pity of it was that what he wanted was Kassandra. He didn't even know her name. 

She didn't need to stroke his cock because he stiffened there as she straddled him, till the shaft was thick and the tip leaked copiously against his stomach, which was already heaving with his breath. He strained against the cord belt she'd tied around his wrists and she wondered idly if he could have broken free of it had he really wished to - she didn't find out, because he clearly didn't really wish to. All he did was brace his heels against the bed as she took the length of him in her left hand and spread herself wide open with her right one. He clenched his jaw as she rubbed the tip against herself and let him feel how slick she was, and frankly had been since they'd fought. Then she nudged him back and with one swift move she pressed down and took him in right to the hilt. 

When she gasped from it, so did he. When she clenched around him, his hips twitched up. And when she moved, her thighs spread wide, her back straight, hands tight at her knees, he bucked up to meet her, pulling on the cord. She liked the way it made the muscles stand out in his arms and in his shoulders. She liked the way his chest heaved with his breath and his cock pushed up inside her. He felt bigger than expected, and she felt herself pull tight around him, as she squeezed her own breasts and rode him harder. Then she ran one hand down between her thighs, to the place she opened up around him, slicked her fingers with her own wetness and rubbed hard at her clit. She clenched. He groaned. Fuck, she liked the sound of that. 

She came with him inside her, not too long after, which was fine by her as she hadn't been aiming for longevity. He wasn't finished but that suited her, she thought, and pulled back to let him slip back out. He grimaced, lost in a place between anger and arousal, but it wasn't like she planned to leave him there like that - she traced the long, thick vein in his cock with her forefinger and felt his cock give a lively kick. She tapped it firmly against the tip and he pulled down at the cord again. One last touch - a tight squeeze at his balls - and he came all over his own stomach. She smiled. He scowled. Then she put her tunic on. 

"I heard them call you Deimos," he said, as she leaned over to untie him. "Is that your name?"

She stepped back. She tied the belt around her waist and looked at him, lying there, damp and messy with his thick cock still taking time to soften. She didn't say a word, though; she just left, and closed the door behind her. In her room, though, with the lamp blown out, with the moonlight pouring so brightly through the window that it seemed to mock her as she tried to sleep and fuck, she'd have put it out if she'd just had the power to, she couldn't help but think about that question. 

_Deimos_. She'd chosen the name the day she'd claimed the sword, like Helen when she'd left the Temple: _Helen_ for the face that launched a thousand ships and _Deimos_ to strike fear. She wasn't sure what she wanted more: him to fear her, or to want her.

There was another competition in the morning: wrestling, this time. The men stripped naked and although they all knew women weren't supposed to watch, she watched them with the Helens. But she didn't stay for long. 

When she left the patch of well-pressed garden dirt the soldiers had claimed for their training ground and ventured deeper into the garden, Stentor followed her. When she led him to an arbour, out of sight, in the shade, he followed her. There was a wide stone table with an old sundial on it that clearly hadn't seen the sun in years and she pressed her palms against the marble, and when she looked back at him over her shoulder, he seemed to understand. His fingers caught the hem of her tunic and pulled it up over the back of her thighs. His fingers slipped between her legs and stroked her there, and she bent a fraction lower. When he pressed his fingers in, he groaned, albeit muffled against his own forearm. Then he replaced his fingers with his cock. 

They fucked again that evening, too, in Stentor's room, but by the morning she was gone. The Ghost had sent word: they no longer needed Stentor, and Kassandra was in Boeotia. The Cult would let the two of them have their confrontation and see what came of it. 

Deimos left. She wouldn't say she'd have rather stayed, but she'd say she wasn't finished. 

\---

"You knew who I was," Stentor says. And of course she did. She's not surprised that he knows it was her; the only surprise is they're having this conversation, after all this time. 

Sparta is a strange place, but sometimes she sees familiar things there in it. She wasn't coddled as a child, after all - Chrysis liked to act as if the children she raised were her own flesh and blood, but they saw plenty of their own flesh and blood on their hands and their clothes and the dusty fucking floors while she was training them. Spartans are like that, too. Stentor is. Perhaps that's why he wants Kassandra, the sister that isn't quite so Spartan, instead of her - they're not so alike. 

She returned to Sparta half a year ago and he arrived just a couple of months after that. She remembers the dinner, sitting at the table, glaring as they ate, and how perhaps only her mater understood, if not completely. It was petty to fight him right there in the house but she really couldn't help it, not knowing what they'd done and what neither of them were mentioning. And, when he left to return to his own house, she wasn't subtle about following - Kassandra is the one who sneaks around in shadows, quiet as a mouse, when Deimos strides in with her sword already drawn. That's the difference, or at least one of many.

They fucked in his kitchen, bent over his table, breaking three cups and a plate in the process. Two days later, they fucked against the inside of his closed front door and tore his tunic while they were at it. Four days later, they fucked outside, against the wall, in the dark, with her back pressed awkwardly against the window ledge and his palms getting scuffed till they were bloody up against the stone. They didn't say a word before she left. In all this time, in all these months of sex and scratches on their skin, bruises from the times they fight, they've never talked about those days in Thebes or nights they've spent in Sparta - until now. 

"Were you sent to kill me?" he asks. 

She frowns at him. "No," she replies. "That was my plan. The Ghost said no." 

"To recruit me, then?"

She doesn't say no, so he takes that as yes. He's not wrong, but they're in Sparta now, in a room in a house that belongs to him where she has no place any more than she has in her father's house. She's not Spartan, not really - at least she's not quite a Spartan woman and he knows that because they fight sometimes like Spartan women don't, on the training grounds or outside their father's house where anyone could see. She fights because she doesn't know another way to be; she thinks he fights because she's not her sister. She's something else entirely, though she's still not sure what.

But, at least, she's no more a part of the Cult of Kosmos now than he is; these days, she has nothing to recruit him to. All she has is this thing that's settled awkwardly between them, that she wants for her own sake now and not for the fucking Ghost of Kosmos.

"Do you have a name?" he asks, suddenly, as he puts the lamp down on the table, as he looks at her, and she considers that. She knows she was born _Alexia_ , second daughter of Myrrine and Nikolaos of Sparta, but she doesn't feel like that fits her at all. _Deimos_ is the name she gave herself, for the Cult, but that's not a place she wants to go back to. The truth is, she doesn't want his fear, if she ever did; she wants something else. 

"Do you want to call me _Kassandra_?" she asks. And it turns her stomach but she thinks she actually might let him.

He frowns. He takes her by the shoulders, fingers digging in, and shakes his head as he shakes her. He doesn't treat her gently and he never has, but she really doesn't want him to. That's one thing she's always liked.

"No," he says. "I want to call you by your name, not hers." 

When he kisses her, roughly, she understands. Their teeth clack and she bites his lip and he pushes her back against the wall, but it's not because he wants her to be someone else and the fucking joy of that rises up inside like a fight in her blood. 

She doesn't ask what's next because she's not sure she knows how to. But when they push and pull their way into his room and she pushes him down onto his back, when she pins his hands above his head, he lets her. 

For now, her name doesn't matter. He knows precisely who she is.


End file.
